“I think that the Baumer Professorship is about relaying the pathways and pitfalls that you might find as you progress through the discipline; by looking at some of the things I did in the beginning you may derive some ideas about how you choose to engage similar challenges and how you may or may not address the discipline after your schooling.”

                                         -Neil Denari, addressing graduate architecture students at the Knowlton School

The Knowlton School announces the publication of the twelfth title in its Source Books in Architecture Series, Neil M. Denari / NMDA: The Baumer Lectures. Source Books in Architecture is a product of the Herbert Baumer seminars, a series of interactions between students and seminal practitioners at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. Neil M. Denari was the Autumn Semester 2015 Herbert Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Neil M. Denari / NMDA: The Baumer Lectures contains transcribed conversations that were part of Neil M. Denari’s appointment as the 2015-16 Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Ohio State University and provide a close look at a few recent projects: the Sotoak Extension, the New Keelung Harbor Services Building, and the Sori Yanagi Museum. Essays by Justin Diles, Courtney Coffman, and Kay Bea Jones contribute to the conversations and highlight a number of elements in the projects that are presented as well as those from NMDA’s larger body of work. The book captures the evolving trajectory of a practice that continues to exhibit the qualities that made it original in the first place.

Neil Denari emerged in New York with a series of theoretical projects and texts based on the collapse of the machine aesthetic of Modernism. In 1988, he founded his firm, Neil M. Denari Architects (NMDA), in Los Angeles and began teaching at SCI-Arc, where from 1997 to 2002 he was the director. His office is dedicated to exploring the realms of architecture, design, urbanism and all aspects of contemporary life.

Denari is the recipient of the Los Angeles AIA Gold Medal in 2011. In 2010, he was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame and in 2009 he received the California Community Foundation Fellowship from the United States Artists organization. He received an Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters in 2008.

His work has been included in numerous exhibitions, including the solo shows Fast Forward at the Museum of the City of New York (2008), Architects’ Work: HL23 at Syracuse University (2009) and The Artless Drawing at Ace Gallery Los Angeles (2010). In 2013, he was included in the show New Sculpturalism at MOCA Los Angeles.  His drawings and models are in the permanent collection of eight major museums around the world. The Knowlton School’s Banvard Gallery hosted his exhibition, Displaced Buildings in Aperiodic_City (2017).

Source Books in Architecture 12: Neil M. Denari / NMDA: The Baumer Lectures is available through Amazon.